Peace in Phnom Penh: reflections on Cambodia’s long road from Year Zero

By Matthew Robinson

Matthew is a British-Cambodian TV and film producer, director and writer. In this article, he offers a deeply personal and historically rich reflection on Cambodia's hard-won peace, written from the serenity of Phnom Penh’s Raffles Hotel during Khmer New Year. Blending memoir and reportage, he traces the country’s tumultuous journey from the brutal Khmer Rouge era to its present-day stability—revealing how the ghosts of history still whisper beneath the surface of celebration, development, and apparent calm.

Location of Cambodia (Creative Commons image cropped – linked to licence – original by Addicted04)

Peace and Cambodia! For those with only a sketchy knowledge of this small tucked-away South East Asian country, these two words may appear to sit uncomfortably together. I’m writing this in the country’s capital, Phnom Penh on 17th April 2025 while relaxing for a few days at “Raffles Hotel Le Grand” in the midst of general celebrations for “Khmer New Year”. Moving out of my central apartment and ensconcing myself in Cambodia’s most opulent hotel was entirely for a personal peaceful purpose: to escape the chaos and unbearable noise of the festivities in every street of every city, town and village: perhaps bearable for a non-Cambodian for a short while, but not bearable (for me at least) day and night for the official three-day festival, in effect lasting almost a week.

17th April 1975

Three features of my escape to personal peace – “17th April 2025”, “Khmer New Year” and “Raffles Hotel” – combine three different aspects of the national peace (or lack of it) experienced by all Cambodians in the past, the present, and most likely in the future. The date happened to be the exact 50th anniversary of the day when, on 17th April in 1975, the ultra-Marxist Khmer Rouge forces strode arrogantly into Phnom Penh, having defeated the rightist government’s army which had controlled the country, with American help, since 1970. The capital’s citizens, their numbers swollen by thousands of country folk pouring in from villages to evade the encroaching murderous Khmer Rouge army, hoped that peace would be established after the years of civil war, turmoil and violence.

How wrong they were. Within days the vengeful Khmer Rouge soldiers, at the behest of their leaders Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, leng Sary (known by the Orwellian titles of Brothers Number One, Two and Three) and their Head of State, Khieu Samphan, ejected the entire population from the city, from their houses and hospitals, babies and grandmas, prodding them at gun point into the countryside, mostly miles away, in April’s blistering heat. Here, on pain of death, they were collectivised and forced to labour up to eighteen hours a day, constructing huge dams and irrigation systems with flimsy shovels and bare hands, or in the rice fields attempting to meet their Stalinist leaders' impossible target of three harvests a year.

The Brothers, meanwhile, had set the country back to “Year Zero”, abolishing everything that existed before – money, schools, ownership, individualism. They aimed to make Cambodia completely self-sufficient, to cut themselves and their enslaved population off from the rest of the world. Anyone who showed any sign of protestation was immediately shot or dragged off into the network of prisons, controlled by the regime’s head jailer commonly known as “Duch”. Fanatically aligned with his leaders’ extreme communistic ideology, this abominable man obtained confessions to “traitorous activities” by subjecting victims to unspeakable torture before ordering them to be “smashed” with lorry axles in the notorious killing fields.

Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge tragedy, lasting three years, eight months and twenty days – colloquially “3.8.20” today – reduced the population of eight million by a quarter, two million deaths caused by execution, starvation and disease. Disease because doctors had been one of the first professions dispatched by The Brothers, followed by teachers, engineers, foreign language speakers, academics – sometimes people who happened to wear glasses. This limited period of brutal internal violence (quashed only after armed intervention by neighbouring Vietnam infuriated at the Khmer Rouge’s border incursions and massacres of their villagers) should not give the impression that Cambodia, populated by notably gentle and docile people, had been at peace during previous centuries.

Angkor Wat (Creative Commons image (cropped) original by Jakub Hałun - linked to licence)

Khmer New Year

Now to the second aspect of my retreat to Raffles to find personal peace: “Khmer New Year”. This centuries-old tradition, held in mid-April, marks the end of the Harvest Season. Its roots stem from the mighty Khmer Empire, gradually turning from Hinduism to Buddhism while embarking on a 700-year era of temple building that peaked in the 12th century with the completion of the massive Angkor Wat. The world’s largest religious edifice is decorated with carved depictions of everyday life as it was then, the creation of the universe, and fierce battles between gods and demons. Also depicted are the many fierce and bloody battles waged by King Suryavarman II. Angkor Wat’s carvings were intended to showcase the immense power of his kingdom, which subjugated vast swathes of South East Asia including Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and southern China.

Slavery was endemic throughout the Khmer Empire and, though few first-hand accounts of Angkor Wat’s erection exist, it is probable that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of labourers – slaves imported from conquered territories – were killed, by accident or execution, during its construction. Thus, Khmer New Year can hardly claim a peaceful genesis. These days it is celebrated in part by raucous young Cambodians waiting on street corners, ready to squirt water from plastic guns (guns!) over any passer-by, water representing the washing away of sins and bad luck from the previous year. Many “celebrants” stand on top of giant speakers blasting, not the soothing chants of Buddhist monks, but thunderous rap rubbish, woofers turned up to maximum, the deep vibrations felt and the noise heard streets away.

Raffles Hotel Le Royal, Phnom Penh

Raffles Hotel

And so to “Raffles Hotel”, the third aspect of my personal peace, and the present peace, or freedom from conflict, enjoyed by Cambodians themselves. Designed in Art Deco style in the 1920s by a renowned French architect (nineteenth century Cambodia had requested French protection to discourage encroachment by Thailand and Vietnam, both avaricious for their neighbour’s fertile land), it thrived for decades as the country’s most luxurious hotel, until the day the Khmer Rouge army arrived, swaggering down the wide boulevard that still runs alongside the building. Shortly after Phnom Penh had been emptied of people, a couple of remaining French diplomats persuaded The Brothers to make Raffles Hotel a “safe haven” for the few journalists brave enough to stay on. But once the victorious communists – far to the left of Mao Tse Tung – gained complete control of the whole country, that status was revoked. After the diplomats and journalists were expelled, the hotel was used as a storage dump for weapons and food. The elegant building fell into shocking disrepair, birds fluttering through broken windows, starving dogs wandering in and out of open doors swinging on their hinges, swimming pool filled with stinking detritus. The Khmer Rouge had as little care for historic buildings as they did for people, even using Angkor Wat’s walls for small arms target practice.

Now fast forward to the Raffles Hotel of today, perhaps the jewel in Cambodia’s peaceful façade. This fifty-year journey takes in a decade of post-intervention Vietnamese rule that many within the decimated Cambodian population considered only slightly less violent than “3.8.10”. It also encompasses a form of civil rule after the 1991 “Paris Peace Accords”, signed by 19 nations and various Cambodian cabals, tasked the United Nations to arrange disarmament and the first democratic election in 1993.  It includes several weeks of violent internal conflict in 1997 with tanks rolling through the streets, grenades exploding, rivals vying for power killed. This vicious battle between political parties finally concluded with Cambodia controlled by a single party; itself controlled by an unwavering Prime Minister who expeditiously permitted the Accords’ five-yearly elections to take place, but with his party nearly always winning by a landslide. An exception was in 2013 when his party, the CPP, still won comfortably but with only 55% of the seats in the National Assembly.

Pol Pot (Public Domain - Wikipedia)

In 2007, a hybrid UN-backed tribunal became operational inside Cambodia overseen by a mixed panel of international and national judges. The protracted process brought charges of, inter alia, “Crimes Against Humanity” and “Genocide” against only five Khmer Rouge leaders. Accusations levelled against more than a maximum of five defendants, opined the Cambodian authorities, might plunge the country back into civil war. Thirteen years of trials and appeals resulted in one dismissal through dementia, one early death, three guilty verdicts, two more deaths and the current life imprisonment of former Head of State Khieu Samphan, now aged 93. Meanwhile Brother Number One, Pol Pot, had died in 1998 hidden in a forest hideout in northern Cambodia. Some say he expired peacefully in his sleep; others that he was forced to take poison by rival remnants of the Khmer Rouge leadership still at large.

It is strange for me today, knowing slightly more than a sketchy outline of Cambodia’s turbulent past, to ponder the peace that this country has been enjoying during the 22 years I’ve been working here.  

I write this account in the searing heat of mid-April under the cool of frangipani trees surrounding Raffles swimming pool, now immaculate, children of rich foreigners and well-to-do Khmers having fun as they splash around together. Skyscrapers and construction cranes, harbingers of Cambodia’s entry into today’s world, peep over the roof of this sumptuous hotel while distant sounds of Khmer New Year don’t really disturb my personal peace.

As for the country itself, it is now undeniably at peace. Though built on fragile grounds, and Cambodian politics can hardly be described as genuinely democratic, I foresee little reason why this peace should be shattered in future, near or far. “Peace for us,” said an elderly man in a film I made for local television about the Khmer Rouge atrocities, “lies not in revenge but in the forgiveness we hold in our hearts.” Losing his grandparents, parents, siblings and children during the regime, he at least survived. Today this senior citizen rejoices in the freedom and peace under which younger generations of Cambodians can now live without much thought – or guilt – about the horrors they are fortunate enough never to have experienced.

More about the author

Matthew Robinson is a British-Cambodian TV & Film producer, director and writer. Educated at Huntingdon Grammar School and Friends’ School, Saffron Walden, he graduated from King’s College, Cambridge in economics in 1966. In 2003, after 37 years in British television – current affairs and drama, where he won two BAFTAs – he took a three-year contract with the BBC to make TV drama about Cambodian health issues, a project financed by the British Government. Contract completed in 2006, he settled in Cambodia permanently, founding a TV & Film production company, Khmer Mekong Films (KMF). Staffed by Cambodians, KMF makes movies for Cambodian cinema; also TV dramas, comedies and documentaries. An audience of over 300,000 subscribe to its YouTube channel. Bachelor, atheist and poet, Matthew Robinson lives in the heart of Phnom Penh. He was granted Cambodian citizenship by Prime Minister, Hun Sen, in May 2020.